Royal commission: Jehovah’s Witnesses grilled over bungled child abuse investigation

AUSTRALIA
ABC – The World Today

ELEANOR HALL: Let’s go now to the royal commission into child sexual abuse which has heard further evidence today about how the Jehovah’s Witness Church dealt with a confessed child sex offender.

Angela Lavoipierre has been following the latest developments in the inquiry and she joins us now.

Angela, who was giving evidence this morning?

ANGELA LAVOIPIERRE: So the commission has heard from an elder of a Queensland congregation called Loganholme named Allan Pencheff. So, this all goes to a case of a woman known as BCG. Which has been one of the key focuses of the commission.

So her father, a senior member of the Jehovah’s Witness Mareeba congregation in Queensland, abused her when she was 17; that was around 1989.

The commission has heard extensive evidence about the fact that BCG’s account was not deemed to be provable under the biblical rules used by the Jehovah’s Witness Church; that’s despite the fact that her three sisters were also abused, and their father, as you mentioned, even confessed to some of the allegations at one point.

So BCH her father was ultimately disfellowshipped for infidelity in his marriage, charges that were completely unrelated to the abuse of his daughters.

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